Twitter

Couple of days ago, Twitter announced it reached a 100 million accounts. I for one was skeptical about the number due to the sheer number of spam accounts that contribute to a large portion of that figure. Tools like TweetBlocker and Twitblock have attempted to clean the mess on Twitter accounts, but spammers have always been one step ahead — and are ready to create a dozen fake accounts if you happen to kill one. Now Twitter is planning to hire engineers to counter spam on the site. According to the its latest job posting the company is looking for [...]

For all of the Twitter users out there, have you noticed a decrease in followers lately? Personally, I have seen my follower count lowered and was wondering what had happened. I think I found my answer. This morning, I read an article detailing the author’s hypothesis that Twitter has been increasing its aggressiveness in fighting spam. The author said he spoke with Twitter’s Trust & Safety leader to see if he was correct, but didn’t get a solid ‘yes’ answer. However, he assumed from the response that Twitter was cracking down on spam. To help confirm his hunch, he did [...]

Advertising has always been a worry for Twitter. The company had to decide between traditional ad-formats like banner ads — or come up with an out-of-box solution for its advertising woes. Twitter chose the latter and it appears it is reaping the benefits of making that sensible decision. Latest report from eMarketer reveals, not only have Twitter users liked the ads appearing in Promoted tweets, in fact, many have benefited from them. The study finds only 10.9% of US Twitter users said Promoted Tweets are “annoying and take away from the Twitter experience.” The relevancy of ads in Promoted tweets [...]

Editor’s Note: Guest post by BlueEyed Digital Marketing. About the Author: Michael Thomas (@gen_social) is the Social Media Director at BlueEyed Digital Marketing . He is a keen social media enthusiast and specialist at developing brands online. From campaigns to community management and content development, BlueEyed are a team of strategic social media marketers. You can follow them on twitter:@hi_blueeyed. We’ve all been Twitterphobes at some point, wondering what it’s all about, how to get involved and why we should actually bother.  In its infancy, it seemed that Twitter was a medium for celebrities to tell you what they were having on [...]

Twitter timeline of yours would never be the same again. Get ready to read promoted tweets in your timeline as the company announced its new ad program to allow promoted tweets to be injected into users’ timeline. The company writes, “We’re introducing a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly, by placing them at or near the top of your timeline. These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once. Promoted Tweets can also be easily [...]

Today President Obama will be answering questions about economy and jobs. Twitter is hosting this event via live webcast directly from Whitehouse. Obviously, Twitter users have tonnes of questions to ask and believe me there are some bizzare ones. So to help us out, TwitSprout prepared an infographic that sheds some interesting stats. Overall, there have been about 30k tweets and 17k questions asked. Some of these have been asked by power users who have Klout score as high as 80. Check out this infographic for more information.

Lets face it, journalists are power users- whether it’s Facebook or Twitter. Facebook reached out to the group first with “Facebook for journalists” . Twitter has now followed the suit with “Twitter for Newsrooms” – a complete guide on how journalists can use Twitter to find stories and engage with the readers. Right from reporting to publishing, Twitter is offering tools that help journalists communicate with the world a whole lot better. Twitter writes.,”We think Twitter and #TfN can be a kind of common ground—and we know Twitter is a tool all journalists can use to find sources faster, tell stories [...]

What appeared to be a bug in Twitter’s app permission feature is in fact a deliberate attempt by the company to provide direct access to private conversations. Direct messaging is often used by Twitter users to have a private conversation on the site. Third party apps can now extract these messages when you explicitly click on Authorize app button. Twitter spokesperson told Mashable that as Twitter was moving to OAuth, it had extended transition period for developers to incorporate changes in their applications to end of June. This was to allow apps to fit to the new model that Twitter [...]

In a move certain to further isolate Twitter from its ecosystem, the company has added automatic link shortening on its site- enabling users to directly paste links into the tweet box. After you compose your Tweet and hit the “Tweet” button, Twitter will shorten the link so that it only takes up 19 characters. As you remember, Twitter snatched up the domain t.co last year in a bid to introduce its custom url shortner. Users had to rely on third party providers to shorten long links to adhere to Twitter’s character limitation. Twitter’s shortener differentiates itself from the third party service providers like Bit.ly by showing [...]